Did anything good come from Glasgow? Well, that depends on how far back you go.
Go back 245 years to Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. The University of Glasgow professor of moral philosophy solidified the case for free-market economies, arguably indispensable to the Industrial Revolution’s lifting more and more of humanity out of extreme poverty.
Go back another 8 years and you get Rev. John Witherspoon leaving his church in Paisley to become President of the College of New Jersey, which became Princeton University. That, too, was most definitely good, Witherspoon serving as a member of the Continental Congress, where he made a strong case for separating from Great Britain, and teaching moral philosophy, including politics, to 19 members of the Constitutional Convention.
Jump forward to 1865 and Joseph Lister studied the role of microscopic germs in causing infection, leading to his development of disinfectants, the practice of sterilizing surgical theaters and devices in hospitals for the first time, and household disinfectants. (One, Listerine, was developed just 14 years later by Joseph Lawrence, a chemist in St. Louis, Missouri.) That undoubtedly good prevented untold millions of deaths from infection.
But jump all the way forward to 2021, and the question, “Did anything good come from Glasgow?” could elicit a different answer: not much, maybe nothing. Or, ironically, a lot of good. It all depends on one’s perspective.
Glasgow hosted COP26. Government representatives from almost every nation, including 130 heads of state, were joined by U.N. bureaucrats, leaders and activists from hundreds of nongovernmental organizations.
The New York Times said world leaders gathered “to debate how to deliver on the unmet promises of the past”, but in summation:
The translation from bureaucratese is: failing to achieve anything substantive, diplomats agreed to try again next year.
As an accurate summation of COP26’s main purpose, it’s safe to say it achieved little if anything.
From the standpoint of people scared to death that we’re all going to fry 9 years from now (since it was 3 years ago that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, declared, “The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change”) — or maybe 15 or 80 years, we’re doomed unless we scratch fossil fuels and replace all their energy with wind, solar, and other “renewables” — from that standpoint, nothing good came out of Glasgow last month.
For those who think human-induced carbon dioxide emissions do contribute to global warming, aka climate change, but that the warming:
- is nothing much in the grand scale of things,
- will likely bring more benefits than harms,
- even at its worst would only make the average person at the end of this century about 4.34 times rather than 4.5 times wealthier than today (as even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits), and
- would be accompanied by enormous greening of the planet and reduction of hunger as plants feast on increased atmospheric CO2.
From their standpoint — which is mine — that little to nothing came out of Glasgow is good. When you expect to get hit by a truck and don’t, that’s something good!
Perhaps the worst thing that could have come out of COP26 would have been a major international treaty that would have brought to realization what 21 years ago was in the Kyoto Protocol: “the first step toward global governance.”
The Glasgow summit could have set us on the path sought by FCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres six years ago. Just before the Paris climate summit began, she said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.” The hope of most of the marchers and protesters was “System change, not climate change!”
Writing for the Manhattan Contrarian the day after COP26, Francis Menton summed up the most important potential outcomes:
- A “path of strict world socialism” in which “the entire world is forced, through binding international agreements, into an energy straitjacket, mandating reduction and then elimination of the use of fossil fuels within two or three decades at most.”
- No binding agreements, though “everybody talks a good game about decarbonization but, lacking meaningful binding agreements, most of the countries, with most of the population, continue to pursue whatever energy system is most reliable and cost effective.”
The first would lead to global disaster, not just economically but also politically as governments come to rule more and more of our lives. The second would see “a small number of wealthy, small-population jurisdictions” like “Germany, California, New York, the U.K. push[ing] the limits of decarbonization and intermittent renewable energy sources” as “the guinea pigs for the rest of the world to find out whether a decarbonized energy system can be made to work, and at what cost.”
COP26’s organizers and boosters wanted number 1. They got number 2. And that’s good. As Menton explains:
Reading the globalbureaucratese (yes, I intended that to be all one word; globalbureaucratese is the only language even more detestable than ordinary bureaucratese) in COP26’s 97 theses, which includes words like recognizes, welcomes, expresses, recalls, stresses, notes, emphasizes, or urges — nary an agrees or commits or pledges or “anything comparable” among them. In short, nobody made any enforceable agreement to do anything.
The COP26 failure is an important obstacle to environmentalists’ attempt to stop or reverse the conquest of poverty throughout the developing world — a subject little discussed at Glasgow.
But that failure does not mean that advocates of liberty and prosperity can rest on our laurels. As Menton concluded, “At this point, the biggest risk is that Biden and the Democratic Congress together put through enough of a ‘Green New Deal’ to effectively destroy the U.S. energy sector and leave the world with no clear shining example of energy success.”
COP26 did not even bring any new progress toward the world’s developing countries’ meeting their pledge at 2009’s COP15 in Copenhagen to transfer $100 billion per year to developing countries for climate finance, which they have not done. It said it regretted the failure and urged repentance. That’s all. No enforcement mechanism — just like with everything else COP26 did.
One major aim of the COP was to adopt language calling the world to “phase out” coal. The closest they got was “phase down” — with no penalty to meet the (nonexistent) target date and amount. Developing countries like India, China, South Africa, and Iran who are building coal plants at breakneck speed to lift their billions out of poverty, were never going to embrace that aim anyway.
Historian and former Member of the European Parliament Paul Nuttal called COP26 “a total waste of time, money, and carbon” — the last being a nod toward the 400-some private jets on which negotiators and the glitterati came to and left Glasgow, emitting as much carbon dioxide as 1,600 Scots emit in a year.
Journalist Rupert Darwall, a senior fellow of the RealClearFoundation, called the conference “a strategic defeat for the West, and for Britain in particular.” But don’t mourn that defeat. Celebrate it. It means the developing world refused to be stuffed into the developed world’s box. It’s insisting on freedom to lift its people out of poverty the way we did — with fossil fuels.
Climate blogger Paul Homewood wrote “we have seen the beginning of the end for the UN’s climate agenda. Developing countries around the world are standing up and refusing to cut back on fossil fuels, because they know they have no alternative if they want to grow their economies and give their people a better life. They have got off the Climate Train. So should we.”
Both President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described COP26 as the world’s last, best chance to save the planet. Thank God, we missed it!